Go for propellant load. Teams will soon begin loading Starship with ~12 million pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Targeting launch for 7:48 a.m. CT

It's the Discombobulator

'Maybe This Will Change Your Mind,’ Says Atheist Slipping St Peter A Crisp $20 Bill At The Gate buff.ly/7IiE8KM

Bring On The Generals: Roughly 60% Of Polled Democrats Would Support A Military Coup zerohedge.com/geopolitical/b…

CORTES: Looks set to be a very tough winter ahead for households of modest means...

I’ve seen a couple of posts about this so wanted to demystify. Today, every Muse user gets a free computer in the cloud. It's a real computer, and we’ve designed the security architecture of the Muse Secure VM carefully so you and your Muse can do almost anything you could with a computer sitting under your desk while keeping you and the system safe from threats like prompt injection. We wrote about this at length in our security blog post – security.muse.ai. Activity in the “runtime cell”, which you share with your Muse is unfettered, but sensitive actions are all overseen by the Sentinel, which runs outside of that cell. Similarly, all sensitive secrets - like the passwords you enter into Muse’s secure credential storage - are also stored outside the runtime cell. The runtime cell gets its own root filesystem (including a full Ubuntu linux image) separate from the host filesystem where your other more sensitive data lives. Because it is isolated from the sensitive stuff that runs on the same box, this means that we can, and do, offer users full visibility and control over the files in the runtime cell. Just as you can when you install Linux on your home computer, you can poke around and see all the files that make the system work - both debian system files and the binaries and data files that implement the parts of Muse which run in the runtime cell. This was a very deliberate choice - your Muse Secure VM truly is your own computer in the cloud. You can install software in it, write and compile code, use the browser to surf the web: it is your own Linux box that you can operate as you choose with your Muse. Poking around in this computer doesn't give you any privileged access to Meta infrastructure, or to other people's data If I may geek out a little here for a second… As a kid I loved to take things apart to see how they worked. As a teenager I got into computers and soon found myself drawn to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and the system registry, later Slackware’s /dev/, /proc/ etc – I could see how the system was laid out and as I explored what DLL files and .so files actually did, I gradually became able to meld the computer to my own will. We’re really proud to be able to put a real computer in millions of people’s hands with a similar level of transparency. We built a file explorer right into the Library tab of the UI. We want you to be able to see the markdown files Muse writes while it thinks about how to serve you better, and explore the internals of the system if you’d like to. So, when you ask your Muse to show you its entire filesystem, and receive gigabytes of files you’re seeing the full contents of the runtime cell. It’s yours to explore and enjoy! If you’re not a geek like me, or simply want to download the data that you personally have created directly with your Muse, we added a feature for that too in Settings > Data controls > Download your agent data.

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use. Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…

We’re in the “phone phreaking” era right now for AI agents. AI agents are selling you on convenience; how they will actually work at scale is very different: a cautionary tale Back in the 60s and 70s, some kids figured out you could use toy whistles and the like to control AT&T’s phone network. AT&T actually published the relevant frequencies in open literature; you could just look them up. AT&T did this for the benefit of telephone engineers; it never considered that the system could be hacked. The system worked so long as no one took advantage of it. It was convenient. But once knowledge spread of *how* it worked, and how easy it was to reverse engineer, it broke down. AT&T shifted over to a different system, and phreaking came to an end AI agents are doing the exact same thing. They’re taking advantage of a system that works on human trust, and also on the friction - the time cost - that having to call or chat to a customer service agent imposes. Everyone has made the calculation about whether or not it was “worth it” to make a complaint or request or to raise an issue. Often, it isn’t. So you just don’t say anything. AI agents reduce the cost of complaints/requests to ~ zero. Anything free is consumed at much higher rates, so we should expect the total volume of this category to explode. Further, today companies and their employees typically assume that the complaints or requests they receive have an actual person behind them. Once AI agents become a mainstream thing, this will no longer be true. Now the assumption will be reversed: that any given customer interaction is actually coming from a bot. Just as early car ownership was liberating, but mass ownership represents a constraint on your freedom, the same will be true with AI agents. People using these agents today are getting good responses from companies because they are benefiting from the (now unwarranted) assumption that these requests are coming from a person. They’ll no longer think this in the near future. The ways they train their customer service people to deal with customer requests will change, too. You don’t have to be nice to an agent. And they won’t be. The return to AI agents will decline as companies build entirely new workflows to deal with the huge volume of automated requests they’ll be getting from bots in the near future The system today works on trust: that there’s a real person behind each customer interaction, and that if somebody has reached out to you, they’re concerned or mad or scared or whatever enough to do so. The contact is a signal that some minimal threshold of importance has been met. The business model is built on this belief about customer behavior. But that trust is broken by ubiquitous AI agents. None of the current assumptions will hold true in the future. Once the customer population is mostly bots, the nature of customer service (at least online) is fundamentally changed Agents will make the online environment even worse. I’m very bearish on the category. All the tech guys seem excited by this new frictionless world of automated convenience where the agents are getting you automatic refunds and canceling your old subscriptions and getting you that free upgrade on your next flight Please. You’ve got to think non-linearly. All these new frictions will need to be introduced to keep the system working smoothly. Agents rely on deception; that there’s a person behind them. But that’s not a safe assumption anywhere. So the system will adjust, just as it did with the phreakers: from default open and trusting, to adversarial: prove you’re human

This…👇🏻

Massive Ancient Underworld. A Million Cubic Meters of Stone — and No Name Left Behind Who Built the Longyou Caves? In 1992, farmers in Longyou County, Zhejiang, drained a pond they hoped to stock with fish. The water fell away and an entrance opened into something no local record had prepared them for: a vast, hand-carved underground hall. Whoever built it removed an estimated one million cubic meters of solid rock and then vanished from the historical record. The Longyou Caves — also called the Xiaonanhai Stone Chambers — now number 24 known caverns cut into hard siltstone at Fenghuang Hill. Together they cover more than 30,000 square meters. Some ceilings rise nearly 30 meters. Massive stone pillars hold the roofs. In places, the wall between two neighboring chambers is only about 50 centimeters thick, yet the builders never punched through. The geometry is deliberate. The work is consistent from cave to cave. Every surface carries the same signature: parallel, angled chisel marks laid in uniform bands across walls, ceilings, and pillars. That pattern is the strongest evidence of human labor. It is also almost the only evidence. No tools have been found. No spoil heap matching the excavated volume has been identified nearby. No building, wall, or monument in the region has been shown to reuse that missing stone. A project of this size should have left a paper trail. It would have required a large, organized workforce working for years. Chinese historical writing is rich for the centuries in question. Local legend is rarely silent about a wonder in its own backyard. Longyou is silent. The caves do not appear in the official record. The earliest clear written mention is a 17th-century poem by Yu Xun, which only proves the chambers already existed by then. Dating is incomplete. Stalactite growth suggests the interiors are older than the Qin unification of 221 BCE. Pottery recovered from silt inside the caves has been dated to the Western Han period (206 BCE–23 CE), which shows people were using the spaces by that time — not necessarily that they cut them. Style of carving and the likely use of bronze tools point many researchers toward the Spring and Autumn period through the Western Han. That is a range, not an author. Actual age may be 1000s of years. The usual explanations buckle under the details. A quarry would explain the missing stone, but not the finished aesthetic. Quarries are not lined with decorative striations on every ceiling and not left standing on carefully proportioned pillars. Imperial tombs would explain the labor, but excavators found no skeletons, no grave goods, no funerary layout. A hidden barracks or storehouse would explain the location near old routes and river country, but the chambers show almost no signs of ordinary occupation: no hearths, no soot-blackened ceilings, no refuse layers of the kind armies and warehouses leave behind. So the honest answer to “who built the Longyou Caves?” is still: we do not know. Someone commanded enough people, enough time, and enough surveying skill to hollow a hill to a single technical standard and then leave no byline. The stone remembers the chisel. The archive does not remember the hand that held it.

"On the advice of counsel, I plead the fifth of Jack Daniel's, your honor."

Hyperborea implies the existence of Hypoborea